How an aristocrat with a megaphone scandalised London
Edith Sitwell’s Jazz Age experiment ‘Façade’ left people baffled 100 years ago. By Matthew Dennison
ASix feet tall, Sitwell dressed somewhere between Elizabeth I and a prophetess
century ago, on January 24 1922, in a Chelsea drawing room, there premiered a startling entertainment that baffled almost everyone present. Across the room, a large curtain had been hung. It was a painted cloth, at its centre a disturbing, mask-like image of a face. Its eyes were closed, its mouth an enormous hole through which protruded a papier-mache megaphone. Behind the cloth, concealed from view, crouched four musicians. A poet clasped the megaphone, a composer raised his baton. White light from snow in the London square outside cast an eerie glow over the gaping mouth.
On offer, typewritten programmes indicated, was: “Miss Edith Sitwell on her Sengerphone, with accompaniment, overture and interlude by WT Walton.” The eldest of the three eccentric children of baronet Sir George Sitwell, Edith was 34 and, like her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, unmarried. For five years, she had edited a modernist poetry anthology called Wheels. The composer William Walton, then 22, had yet to make his name. A friend of Sacheverell, known as “Sachie”, Walton was beneficiary of a laid-back sort of patronage on the part of the artistic brothers, and was lodging in their attic. That night, in the brothers’ violet-, pink- and blue-painted drawing room, in front of an audience warmed by rum punch spiked with green tea and sherry, Edith initiated the best known of what Osbert would later call the patrician siblings’ “series of skirmishes and hand-to-hand battles against the Philistine”.
The entertainment was Façade. In its first version, 18 of Edith’s poems were set to music for trumpet, clarinet, flute, cello and drums, by Walton. Did anyone understand what they heard? “Long steel grass – The white soldiers pass – The light is braying like an ass,” intoned Edith with sly humour: more than anything else she wrote, Façade provided grounds for Leonard Woolf ’s view that Edith Sitwell was “up to the neck in modernity”.
In the short term, it earned her more opprobrium than admiration. The Tatler judged a performance the following month: “Almost bizarre, in fact. A huge and grotesque face, behind which sat Edith Sitwell shouting out her poems through a megaphone! It’s a new idea at any rate, but nobody seemed quite able to make up their minds if it was clever or merely mad!” A year later, critics at Façade’s first public performance – at the Aeolian Hall on June 12 1923 – made up their minds. The Daily Graphic called it “drivel they paid to hear”. “Surely,” suggested the “Mr London” gossip column, “it is time that this sort of thing were stopped.”
“Mr London” need not have worried. Façade did not inspire countless imitations, but its success de scandale did confirm all three Sitwells as literary celebrities – as well as earning them widespread popular derision. In a sketch called “The Swiss Family Whittlebot”, Noel Coward satirised Edith as Hernia Whittlebot. Later he published two collections of Hernia Whittlebot’s verse. Coward’s offerings included “Sitwell”-style descriptions like “the water-melon purity/ Of Mrs Hodgson’s chignon/ Netted like a grape”.
These willowy aristocratic aesthetes were not averse to attention, however contentious. All three became prolific authors; they were photographed by Cecil Beaton in images that confirmed the public’s misgivings of the trio as rarefied, aloof and effete. In 1932, critic FR Leavis dismissed them as “belong[ing] to the history of publicity rather than of poetry”.
Leavis’s was a cruel assessment: an undaunted Edith labelled him a “tiresome, whining, pettifogging little pipsqueak”. She was evangelical in her conviction that poetry should engage with the spirit of the time, and confident that, in Façade, she had done just this. It did not matter to her that audiences struggled to grasp the poems’ meaning. Edith described her verses as abstract, “patterns in sound”. They were experiments in cadence and onomatopoeia, partly inspired by the syncopated rhythms of jazz. The postwar spirit, she decided, was tumultuous and unsettled – therefore so were the rhythms of Façade.
She also recognised the value of publicity in validating her determination, as a woman, to be taken seriously as a writer. Unlike her brothers, she did not receive a generous income from her father. While Osbert and Sachie decorated the house in Carlyle Square with paintings by Modigliani and Nevinson, lining the walls with silver lame, cluttering tabletops “amusingly” with Victorian domes of wax fruit and surrounding their dining table with 18th-century shell-inspired silver chairs, Edith camped with her 40-something former governess Helen Rootham in a fourthfloor flat in a working-class block of flats in Bayswater, which she described as “untidy, dingy, badly lighted”. By her brothers’ standards, her inheritance was nonexistent.
Edith had counted on selling a diamond pendant promised to her by her mother to furnish the flat, but discovered that all the most valuable family jewels, including the pendant, were destined for her brothers. Like other unmarried women, she was cast on her resources.
Happily, those resources were considerable. If the first performance of Façade presented the entertainment as a joint Sitwell endeavour, with poems by Edith, musical accompaniment suggested by Sachie and the creator of the stage cloth, artist Frank Dobson, discovered by Osbert, there is no doubt – press carping aside – that it was Edith who emerged as the serious poetic talent of the three. Sachie wrote extensively on architecture and ballet, he and Osbert both wrote fiction and Osbert produced a popular four-volume autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand. Even in prose, which she wrote exclusively for money, Edith was her brothers’ equal: her biographies of Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria and her collection of short lives, English Eccentrics, were commercial as well as critical successes. By her death in 1964, Edith had produced 17 collections of verse. Her 1941 poem of the London Blitz, Still Falls the Rain, has been frequently anthologised since.
Edith had also turned herself into a living work of art. Six feet tall, snipe-featured and, in her own mind, resembling the tomb effigies of her Plantagenet ancestors, she was decidedly unconventional in appearance. Over time she exaggerated these traits. An upperclass iconoclast, she evolved a style of dress that, combined with huge pieces of jewellery, transformed her into Elizabeth I-cum-prophetess. “If one is a greyhound,” she asked, “why try to look like a Pekingese?” Like Façade, her dramatic self-invention was distinctive, original – and gloriously compelling.
An evening lecture by Sitwell archivist Chris Beevers, ‘Behind the Façade: The Sitwells Revealed’, is at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, at 6pm on February 2